Are the current fees acceptable for the functioning of an actual "currency?" Absolutely not. I've maintained for a long time that bitcoin isn't the currency at all – nor is the majority of things currently referred to as cryptocurrencies.

They are commodities. Commodities have trade costs, they have overhead for doing business in the field, they are far too awkward to trade directly – which is exactly why we came up with real currencies, fiat currencies, which made the modern economy possible.

I've actually gone further and said that no currency can exist which you can't buy things you want with. I stand by that. For the most part, and most of the world, as much as people would like to say that cryptocurrencies are leading to banking the un-banked – they are largely just leading to situations where someone hands and IOU to someone else which entitles them to claim a different IOU.

That's not to say that cryptocurrencies can't be useful, but if we're honest we have to admit that for the most part they are not currently so.

The newfound obsession of States with regulating anything that could possibly be a commodity or extend extant economies just brings that much more pressure against the functionality of cryptocurrencies.

Steem, in many ways, epitomizes this. It is almost impossible to use it as a medium of trade. If you live in a place with a functioning economy, it's even harder to. Earning steem is as much hoping for the whale lotto as it is doing consistent work of consistent quality, if not more so. The systems of exploitation are inherent to the design of the blockchain.

If anything could improve the lot of bitcoin in cryptocurrencies in general, it might be a general collapse. Cryptocurrency is, at the moment, almost entirely a speculative engine, and you can tell that by looking at what people write about it. They are talking about how they can use it, how they have used it, or how they can spend it – almost every post is about how to make it, and how to turn it into other forms of itself.

At least we can make electronic contacts out of gold.

At the moment, the best thing about bitcoin is that it will cost slightly less bitcoin to use bitcoin to do those tiny number of things that bitcoin can be used for.

That's a hard situation to be in.